I don’t know if it’s inevitable that age and experience brings cynicism, but theongoing discussion about social recruiting certainly brings out the skeptic in me. Social recruitment is about the…

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Another week, another ‘job boards are dying’ blog post. If I had a dollar for every post like this, I’d be a (moderately) rich man. Truly.

I try to avoid the ‘job boards are dying’ discussion because (a) it’s a flamer’s game (not unlike arguing with those who disbelieve climate change), and (b) those of us in the biz know it…

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Imagine that you’re one of the thousands of job boards that provided Indeed with job postings from its inception. Imagine that in addition to providing those jobs (which turned Indeed into the most visited job site on the web), you also spent money promoting those same jobs – thus providing Indeed with a lucrative source of income. Imagine that, in return, Indeed provided your job board with a stream of inbound referrals (both organic and…

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One of the first business lessons I learned many years ago was that it is often better to havemany smaller customers than fewer large ones. At the time, I was learning the ropes from a battle-hardened magazine publisher. He said (in reference to my naive comment that I would rather have Microsoft as an advertiser than a dozen smaller ones), “Where are you when your big customer decides to ‘shift focus’? Your loss will be 100% of income, rather than 15% or 20%. How long does…

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In the beginning, there was the job board, and the candidates rejoiced. So many jobs! So many locations! So much easier than paper.

The employers liked it, too.

But after a while, candidates realized that general boards were, well….general. They discovered that many (er, most) jobs were inapplicable to their interests. So they asked the job boards to make things easier. “Help us find just the jobs we want!”

Job board operators responded in a variety of…

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Back in the dark ages, when the Job Board Doctor was first learning the mysteries of sales and marketing, he was told that he should “sell benefits, not features.”

Fast forward, umm…many years. I’m still telling clients (and myself) to focus on the benefits, not the features. You think I would’ve learned by now!

It’s a tough lesson to learn. For one thing, it’s a lot easier to list the new, snazzy, ‘gee whiz’ features that your job board has:…

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When was the last time you asked your job board customers what they want? Not just a one-off question to a few clients – but an systematic, organized survey of everyone who uses your site? Employers and job seekers?



A recurrent theme in the ‘job boards are dying’ blog posts that I see is a feeling by recruiters, employers, and job seekers that the ‘big boards’ are out of touch. In other words, they don’t know what their customers want. Now, I’m guessing that they would argue with… Continue

Branding often gets a bad rap – as if there is something inherently bad in trying to create a unique, persuasive persona for your job board. Nothing could be further from the truth.



Think about it: most of the truly successful job boards out there have built successful brands. Monster. CareerBuilder. Dice. The Ladders. RegionalHelpWanted. Of course, a brand won’t replace solid technology, good marketing, and SEO. But in combination with these, branding will help push your job board… Continue

You can’t cough these days without bumping into a ‘free’ job board, i.e., a job board where employers can post their jobs at no charge. Free job site, free Tweets, free everything. Now, there have always been a few of these boards around, but in the past year or so, it seems like they’ve been reproducing like the proverbial rabbits.



What gives? Some would argue that Free, by Chris Anderson, put a voice to a burgeoning movement: “In a marketplace with low marginal costs and many… Continue